WHAT IS PROFESSIONAL BANKING?

Patrick Mususa, Executive Director of The Tanzania
Institute of Bankers (TIOB).

Tanzania’s banking sector has experienced significant growth from its first reforms in the early 1990s, growing from just 11 banks to a current total of 59 licensed banks. The financial sector reforms undertaken at the time were intended to improve the sustainability of the country’s economic growth by enabling the effective mobilization of financial resources for viable projects and economic activities and improving the accessibility of financial services to all Tanzanians. Significant progress has been achieved in this regard.

More recently, innovative advances in ICT have made banking services more efficient and more remotely accessible than before, allowing banks to build large and widely dispersed networks across Tanzania. This has greatly contributed to successfully banking approximately 30% of the total population of Tanzania to date.

However the growth of the banking sector has been achieved against odds of low financial literacy, cultural barriers and the wide geographic distribution of the local population as well as the less than ideal level of professionalism in the relatively inexperienced workforce.

After some 20 years of impressive banking sector growth one thing that is still in urgent need of attention is the lack of integrity of a not too insignificant number of employees in the sector. More emphatically, the integrity of some of the present-day bankers has garnered increasing mistrust from customers and other stakeholders.

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